Method for Determination of Technical Noise Contributions to Ion Motional Heating

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to identify and mitigate the impact of technical voltage noise on ion motional heating in microfabricated Paul traps, improving quantum information processing fidelity.

Contribution

A reliable technique to determine whether ion heating is mainly caused by residual voltage noise on DC or RF electrodes, and strategies to reduce RF noise effects.

Findings

Stray DC fields can shift ion position, increasing RF noise contribution.

Minimizing pseudopotential gradient reduces RF technical noise impact.

Method effectively distinguishes noise sources affecting ion heating.

Abstract

Microfabricated Paul ion traps show tremendous promise for large-scale quantum information processing. However, motional heating of ions can have a detrimental effect on the fidelity of quantum logic operations in miniaturized, scalable designs. In many experiments, contributions to ion heating due to technical voltage noise present on the static (DC) and radio frequency (RF) electrodes can be overlooked. We present a reliable method for determining the extent to which motional heating is dominated by residual voltage noise on the DC or RF electrodes. Also, we demonstrate that stray DC electric fields can shift the ion position such that technical noise on the RF electrode can significantly contribute to the motional heating rate. After minimizing the pseudopotential gradient experienced by the ion induced by stray DC electric fields, the motional heating due to RF technical noise can be significantly reduced.